Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (27 page)

“I’m tired,” he said.

“I know,” I reassured him, as we traded our private ironies: Larry, the weary, working househusband; me, exhausted, from bed rest and worry. At night we hugged hard, as if the tight embrace would keep our baby intact. Piper slept under our bed.

A trace of blood appeared on the sheets.

In a few days Larry opened the door to the nursery that, after the miscarriage, reverted to a spare room. Piper sniffed at its threshold and then curiously peered in. He let out a low growl.

“Good dog,” I said, patting him.

Through the next few weeks we no longer talked of cribs and changing
tables. We didn’t compare canary yellow paint samples to goldenrod. The ecru paint already on the wall would do.

Conversation remained in the present, avoiding the immediate past and any hopes for a future that would include a child. Larry went to work. I would have to wallow in more worrisome places at home, until my teaching job restarted after Labor Day. My body had healed, but the mind still oozed. I felt empty. I felt robbed.

One late August morning I let Piper out as usual. Thick pines, like the one outside the front window, lined the yard. Piper must have thought these trees were, truly, the boundaries of the world. He took his slow hop down the step. But, today, his sleepy walk halted. Ears up, snout frozen, Piper heard first, what I heard next.

A robin’s sound.

My puppy hurled into a blurry, barking streak at the bird in the grass. This would not have been an unusual scene, except that the robin did not fly away. And quicker than I could distract Piper, the puppy was atop the helpless, hopping prey.

Growls overtook peeps. Then, in one striking snap, silence.

A community of birds screeched, their usual birdsong replaced by quick piercing cries of nesting baby birds. A long shriek followed the dual notes of adult birds sending out alarms.

On the ground the bird lay lifeless. What should have played out as an amusing scene—a dog pawing upward, dancing on its hind legs, a tiny bird safe in flight—turned into a natural catastrophe.

Piper rolled the carcass, sniffed the blood. Oak leaves swished like protesting placards against the sky. I remembered that even before the attack the bird could not fly.

In his scissors bite, Piper carried his prize and placed it, as if a gift, at my feet. I fell to my knees. Tears streamed down my face, some dropping on the dog’s white muzzle. Twisting his snout, right to left, left to right, his eyes swept mine as if confused. Where was the pat, the treat, the praise for this flawless execution of hunter instinct?

“Good dog,” I said, still sobbing. I placed my hand on his
stretched neck. I stroked down to his back and lifted my hand up again to his neck, over and over, acknowledging not his brutal act, but its message. Had the dear, yet flawed, fetus I carried a month earlier, survived, the baby, like the bird, would still not have been able to fly.

“Let’s go inside,” I told the dog, He trotted obediently in front of me.

First published in
Staying Alive: A Love Story
(Signalman Publishing, 2011).

Jeannie E. Roberts

you left home

slipped away

a mere bud

a whisper

in white

perhaps

you passed

through

altered time

beheld

a better place

took root

in brighter space

thrived

in a finer womb

after your heart

set my heart

abloom

Shoshanna Kirk

U
nable to hear a heartbeat, the midwife casts aside her Doppler and wheels out an ultrasound. I think of telling her not to bother—she won’t hear it that way either—but that would be a strange thing to say, so I keep quiet. On ultrasound, the fetus measures small, far smaller than it should be. My husband and I are rushed to radiology for a closer look at my visibly swollen belly on more advanced equipment. Radiology confirms that fetal growth stopped weeks ago.

We listen, mute, to the options. I could have a D and C, or dilation and curettage—scraping. Except they don’t really do curettage any more, the midwife explains. Now they use aspiration. Or, she continues, I could take a drug to induce the miscarriage, though at this stage, ten weeks pregnant, it might not work anyway.

Or I could wait it out. Eventually, my uterus will expel its contents.

In the silence, in which I am supposed to announce my decision, I chew the skin on my thumb until it is close to bleeding.

Bleeding is exactly what is not happening right now. It could take weeks to begin.

On the drive home, I study my husband’s face. His jaw is clenched. The age lines that have developed since becoming a father three years ago seem deeper, longer. I turn to watch the road.
It will be fine
, I announce.
I’ve done it twice before. It’s just like a heavy period with a few more cramps. I’ll just get into bed, and before you know it, it’ll all be over. I’m a tough cookie.
My husband nods and says nothing.

I want my body to do this naturally. After a Pitocin drip, failed forceps delivery, and unplanned C-section with my daughter, I’ve had enough of conventional obstetrics. I have no interest in a “procedure”—aspiration is a fancy word for vacuuming. Nor for drugs, for while said to be safe at this stage, chemical induction poses the single-greatest risk of uterine rupture for someone who’s had a cesarean.

No—this time, no interventions. I want my body to be in charge.

We had already decided to do things differently with this pregnancy. At my daughter’s birth, hospital policy had excluded my husband from the delivery room. After the surgery, the baby was taken away into a warmer room. The shockwaves of these separations have taken months and years to dissipate. This time, we decide, we will do whatever it takes to stay together. Given the reigning climate of anxiety in hospitals, staying together means giving birth at home.

One hour turns into another, and another, and then the days begin to pass. Each day feels longer than the one before. I abandon the book I’m writing about the year I was pregnant with my daughter, the year I gave birth to a real, live baby. I decide instead that knitting is a good way to pass the time, since there seems to be so much of it. I take my daughter to the yarn store, and we take turns touching the skeins. I splurge on white cashmere.

Since everyone I know seems to be pregnant, I will knit baby hats. The first is for a friend’s baby due in just a few days. The pattern seems so small that after the first few rows I try it on my daughter’s stuffed rabbit for size. It fits.

After a week, the on-duty nurse calls.
Just to see how you are doing.
She urges me to make an appointment for a “procedure.” As a placeholder. I thank her for the suggestion.

The following week she calls again. She tells me she had a client who waited four months to start bleeding. Am I sure I don’t want an appointment?

I am sure. At least I think I’m sure. Every day a little bit more of my life force disappears. Time with my daughter is a chore; I spend our afternoons watching the clock, waiting for bedtime. My husband’s conversation is annoying and trite. Friends call, and I let the machine pick up.

One afternoon I pee and discover bright-red blood. I cancel all commitments and stack fantasy novels on the bedside table beside the half-knitted hat. Cramps come and go all evening. I am strangely excited. Soon all this will be behind me.

The next morning, the bleeding has stopped.

I remind myself that this has nothing to do with me. Most miscarriages are caused by genetic abnormalities—they are in fact proof of the body’s wisdom, a way of letting go of aberrance. And yet I am so furious that I can no longer look at myself in the mirror, no longer rest hands on my belly.

I visit an acupuncturist, who creates a mandala of needles around my belly button. A homeopath prescribes envelopes of tiny sugarcoated pellets. I visit an herb store for something, anything, to kick my body out of its lethargy.

At home, I mix an herbal tincture with a cup of hot water as instructed. It is bitter, more bitter than anything I have ever tasted. I drink it as fast as I can and run to the sink to retch. My brother pads into the kitchen and opens a cupboard. “Here,” he says softly, handing me a jar of honey. “To balance bitter, add sweet.” I take a big spoonful and then lean on him to cry.

Sunday marks twelve and a half weeks. The day we should be calling friends and family to announce our news. I awaken with cramps. At breakfast, I snap at everyone and withdraw upstairs.

On the toilet something slips out of me, something warm and wet and heavy. Cramps come stronger, in waves, and more clots follow like slippery lemons. I run a bath and call down to my husband. In a
half hour, we are meant to host a workshop for a dozen parents and children. I tell him he must figure out a way to cancel it.

The cramps last a half a minute, or maybe longer, one after another, four or five minutes apart. Like contractions. I have a vague memory to lower my voice and vocalize through them. I get halfway through an
om
before a sob takes its place.

The bathwater turns pink and then red. I drain the tub to start over.

As the tub fills, I look down at my body on hands and knees. Blood is streaked across my legs. A pile of clots, maybe a gestational sac, lie on a washcloth by the tub’s edge. I put my head down in child’s pose, so as not to faint. All I can smell is blood.

I call for my husband. He appears breathless, holding our daughter who has just awoken in tears from her nap. As I look up at them, stars ring the edges of my vision. I tell him to call the midwife, to ask about signs of hemorrhage. I can hear my daughter’s voice as they fly down the stairs,
Papa, Papa! Is Mama ill?

I squat as I drain the tub again. Another cramp begins, with that strange sensation of things falling out from deep inside. I reach down and deliver the placenta into my hand.

My husband sits on the edge of the bath with a cool washcloth and a shot glass of tincture to stem the bleeding. It burns like whisky, and I chase it with honey. He holds my arm steady as I climb out of the tub and walks me to bed, then dashes back down the stairs.

I lie down and close my eyes. I can hear him dodging my daughter’s endless stream of questions. I am too tired to cry.

I spend late afternoon knitting. A tiny lace pattern runs around the hat’s brim and three ribs corkscrew up to the crown. When I am finished, I cut the yarn, weave in the ends, and go downstairs to join my family.

After my daughter is asleep, my husband and I go out into our tiny garden. I am not sure what kind of ceremony we should have, but it feels wrong to throw everything away. I ring a Tibetan singing bowl and burn some sage while my husband unwraps each piece and
lowers it into a hole in the dirt. After he fills in the hole, he sets down the shovel and clears his throat. I turn him to me by the shoulder and hold him for a long time.

Days later, my friend calls to announce the arrival of her baby. She and her partner are ebullient, riding a postpartum high. Our daughter is transfixed by the sleeping newborn—tiny and ancient and squished. I hand my girlfriend the hat wrapped in thin tissue. Later at home I will cry, but in that moment, I am happy for them and nothing else.

Jenifer Richmond

S
itting on my porch tonight, I see lightning bugs. I wonder what joy my son would have chasing them. I look up to the sky and see a storm is coming. A flash of lightning shines in my eyes, and the thunder rumbles through my ears. A tear falls as I whisper, “I miss you, Noah.” I bury my head in my hands, looking down at the sidewalk. A slow rain begins to fall. Each drop darkens the sidewalk, as if to represent the years and milestones of my son’s life that I have and will miss. The rain becomes heavier and faster as I become more upset at the increasing raindrops on the sidewalk. The thunder grows louder as my cries grow louder, silencing the daily pain I struggle to hide because it makes everyone else more comfortable that I do so. My mind becomes infused with every detail of my pregnancy, my labor, the delivery of my son, the funeral, the aftermath…and here I sit… on my porch…still facing the aftermath. The storm.